The Comics Reporter and Focused Totality have nice reviews of Yotsuba&! And Dorian at postmodernbarney reports
A new volume of Yotsuba&! is good news, as we can’t keep the first two books in stock. An excellent series that has strongly resonated with our customers.
For the record, Yotsuba&! is a big hit in our house, and there was no peace until we got volume 2.
I haven’t been able to blog for the past few weeks because of pressing family responsibilities, but I’m back to report that my daughters, ages 11 and 12, are engrossed in a new project: Translating a volume of Fruits Basket from Japanese to English. So far we’ve been able to determine the following: The conversation in the first frame is about the school cultural festival. The girls are learning the kana pretty quickly, but the way the comic is lettered, it’s hard to divide the characters correctly into words. We have much to learn, but as a vacation activity it beats watching “Full House” reruns all day.
Also, Shojo Beat is huge in my house right now. I have only been able to glance at it, but already I have a beef with them. It’s over the title. I quote from their website:
Note: The word shojo normally appears with a circumflex or macron over the first o, as in shôjo; we removed it for the sake of simplicity and readability in the magazine.
Now, I’m not unsympathetic to this. I lived in France, and I hate those damn diacriticals as much as the next person, but you don’t get to change other people’s languages just because they’re inconvenient. If we could, life would be much easier: Japanese would have only one alphabet, say, instead of three, and Gaelic would be spelled like it sounds, and French wouldn’t assign masculine and feminine genders to everything, including tables and chairs. But we can’t.
In fact, my understanding is that “shojo” means “virgin” in Japanese, so by eliminating that pesky diacritical they have changed the meaning of the title in a rather weird way.
We get a big laugh out of Japanese products that have weird English names, like Pocari Sweat and Pocket Wetty. Now I guess they get to laugh at us in return. You’d think a company as invested in Japanese culture as Viz could at do better. Sigh.
Recently, I commented on Michael Deeley’s favorable review of Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha v1: Kapilavastu but commented that at $24.95 I’d be more likely to borrow than buy the book.
Now Dave Carter of Yet Another Comics Blog has alerted me that Vertical Inc. has announced inexpensive paperback editions of the first two volumes of the series. Their website says they won’t be out until 2006; fortunately, I’ve got plenty to read between now and then…
New manga are coming into my house faster than I can read them lately—because my kids have vacation but I don’t, I guess. Anyway, I’ve finally made my way through the top of the stack, so here are my short takes.
Yotsuba&! Don’t be put off by the cutesy typography of the title. That’s the only false note in this cheerful comedy manga by Azumanga Daioh creator Kiyohiko Azuma. The premise is simple: Yotsuba is a little kid who moves into a new neighborhood and seems mysteriously ignorant of everyday things like swings and air conditioners. Impulsive, curious, likely to go to extremes, Yotsuba is like a little engine driving the plot and all the characters around her. Azuma has done a nice job of channeling her characters’ manic tendencies to make this a very funny book but much more readable than Azumanga Daioh.
Full Moon Stricken with fatal throat cancer, 12-year-old Mitsuki has only one chance at survival: an operation that would remove her vocal chords. But Mitsuki would rather die, literally, than live a life without singing. Two bizarre harbingers of death, in cat and bunny costumes, show up to speed her along the path to the Great Divide but end up derailing their own plans when they help Mitsuki become a singing star. With only one year to live, she wants to find her old friend and true love Eichi, and naturally the only way to track him down is to become a 16-year-old singing sensation. If you are willing to suspend all disbelief, and wade through the very busy art, there is a decent story lurking in here.
Last Hope The premise of Last Hope is not terribly original: That hunky guy at school is really a prince from another dimension who is on the run from an evil uncle—and his dimension-hopping machine is broken. The dark and brooding Hiroto quickly gets entangled with a gaggle of classmates and accidentally (the machine is broken, remember?) transports everyone to some other dimension where the school has been taken over by authoritarian teachers and thuggish security guards. Nope, never seen that one before. What makes it work—and it does work—is not only the cleanly drawn art but also the characters: spunky Colleen, nerdy genius Alvin, and the mangarrific shy-and-sweet Ikuko. If Tohru Honda throws you into insulin shock, Colleen is the antidote. Throw in some obnoxious jocks, and you’ve got… high school. Writer Michael Dignan lets his characters break out of their stereotypes a bit while still keeping the plot simple. A longer-than-usual set of character sketches at the end of the book shows that he and artist Kriss Sison put more thought than usual into these characters. It shows.
How do you get people to notice you? Spend lots of money, as the otaku of Japan have discovered. Or is it that Japan has discovered the otaku? The Guardian tracks the trend, with this amazing statistic:
According to Nomura Research Institute, the otaku market is worth $2.6bn (£2bn).
and this marketing/philosophical insight
Some regard the otaku as a new driving force behind industrial innovation based on satisfying consumers’ aesthetic and emotional needs rather than their desire for status.
Ray Tate reviews Nancy Drew #2 on the Silver Bullet Comics site and finds more nice things to say about the writing than the last reviewer. He’s coming at it from a different perspective, anyway, as someone who likes Nancy Drew more than he likes manga.
Meanwhile, Michael Deeley reviews Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha v1: Kapilavastu on Manga Life. Both look like they’re worth a look, for very different reasons, but the $24.95 price tag on the Tezuka book means I’ll be looking to borrow rather than buy.
